The capability of RSS-news feed integration of foreign language news may be standard now in most LMS, but was not in 2002 (not even having an LMS was standard, I had to build my own while it took the university a few more years to adopt Blackboard as I had recommended in 2000):

But RSS-feed display is skin-deep and, even in extensive-reading pedagogies, not sufficient for integration into teaching and learning which requires more post-processing.

At a recent Digital Humanities Unconference, I was asked how I had “scraped” (RSS-scraping was chosen since it easier than screen scraping, for RSS is devoid of most markup, as long as it validates) into a SQL-server database. Here are some code-snippets to get you

from the web

into the database:

The scraped plain text in the database can form the foundation for post-processing for SLA-purposes, see e.g. glossing for reading comprehension facilitation or question generation with the trpQuizConverter for

I am looking for posts on my blog that fall under the categories “English” (ESL teaching) and (“listening” OR “speaking-4-skills” – never mind the “-4-skills”, another oddity – you can change the slug of posts, but can you change the slug of categories and tags also?).

However, WordPress makes this even easier by allowing for a wealth of atomic searching and filtering options. Choosing the right template (and content strategy), if you click on any of the linked items in either the category list or tag cloud on WordPress,

the resulting page will include an RSS link , or simply add “/feed” to the URL of your category, tag or even search result page, to get a feed that you can subscribe to.

How to subscribe?

MS-Outlookmakes subscribing to RSS more convenient since you do not need to go to a separate application like an RSS-Reader. Read your RSS with your email, think of the RSS feed as an email list, but personalized to your interests.

You can subscribe to the “RSS feed” link like so:

For historical reasons, I still use Google Reader, but I rely on Outlook’s advanced automated content download (including full text posts and multimedia attachments) and well-understood archiving, search and export features to not miss podcasts which I want to collect for potential use as teaching content: When Outlook fails, as with some RSS formats, you can still try and resort to the Internet Explorer Feed store:

If you use OWA: you can read feeds, but not add them through the OWA interface. If you are staff, you can still add them in Outlook first. If you are a student and restricted to NINERMAIL, you need to use a different feed reader. I recommend the free web-based Google Reader.